New Delhi: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) clocked one million followers on its Twitter platform. The RBI thus became the first central bank in the world to reach this milestone. The RBI has pushed the US Federal Reserve and European Central Bank to second and third places on the microblogging site.
As per the latest information available on the RBI’s twitter handle ‘@RBI’, the number of followers has increased from 9.66 lakh September 27, 2020 to one million or 10 lakh. “RBI Twitter account reaches one million followers today (Sunday). A new milestone. Congratulations to all my colleagues in RBI,” Governor Shaktikanta Das said in a tweet Sunday.
The US Federal Reserve Bank is the world’s most powerful central bank. It however, has only 6.67 lakh Twitter followers. The US bank is followed by the Frankfurt-headquartered European Central Bank (ECB), with 5.91 lakh followers. US Fed joined Twitter in March 2009, while ECB has been active on the microblogging site since October 2009.
The 85-year-old RBI got a Twitter account in January 2012. Governor Das has a separate Twitter handle with 1.35 lakh followers. Since March 2019, the count of followers has more than doubled from just about 3,42,000 to over 7,50,000 by March 2020. During the ongoing seven-week lockdown that began March 25, the number of followers has increased by more than 1.5 lakh, an official said. In the current financial year, as many as 2.5 lakh new followers joined the handle, he added.
Besides, its main Twitter handle, RBI has another Twitter account called ‘RBI Says’. The RBI has also started a Facebook page with the same name in early April. At that time, it also launched a customer awareness campaign to prevent gullible account holders from being duped by fraudsters.
